Extract

On March 25 an unusually strange event occurred in Petersburg.

A collegiate assessor in St. Petersburg wakes one morning to find his nose missing from his face, and then encounters it riding through the city in a carriage, dressed in the uniform of a state councillor who outranks him. Nikolai Gogol published this story in 1836, and no interpretation has ever fully tamed it. It is at once a satire of a bureaucracy so obsessed with rank that a body part can achieve higher status than its owner, and something stranger, a vision of selfhood as a thing that can simply detach and walk away. The absurdity is rendered with the deadpan precision of a police report, which only deepens the unease. The nose is never explained. It is simply, terribly, gone.